WHY DO WE (NOT) WORK? FROM SURPLUS VALUE TO SURPLUS ENJOYMENT… AND BACK
WHY DO WE (NOT) WORK? FROM SURPLUS VALUE TO SURPLUS ENJOYMENT… AND BACK

Summary/Abstract: The present paper examines the meaning of work within the logic of capitalism. We argue that the propeller of the capitalist mode of production is something what Marx calls “surplus value”. And we assume that in the idea of surplus value resides an explanation to how work, the way we work and the meaning of work do not respond only to economical requirements but they also involve psychological factors, the way our “libidinal economy” is constituted. To prove this idea, we are going to draw on the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan homology between surplus value and what he calls “plus de jouir”, that is, surplus enjoyment or surplus jouissance. We intend to point out that it’s the constitutive and – as we shall see - paradoxical nature of this surplus that on one hand drives us to work and on the other hand it creates the very conditions of Capital expansion, the prerequisite for the existence of work itself in a capitalist society. Moreover, we shall try to show in the end that the capitalism activates - exactly like the libidinal economy (and this is the sense of Lacan’s homology between surplus value and surplus enjoyment) - the same jouissance characterized by an aimless, infinite and self-referential circuit of production for the sake of accumulation and expansion (i.e., for its own sake). Therefore, if we are to rediscover a meaning of work which doesn’t follow the command of this pernicious surplus enjoyment, we might want to conceive work and social practices containing a dimension beyond capitalism.

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